From the desk of CabelPortland, Oregon 97205

June 15th, 2015

Have you heard of our upcoming game, Firewatch? (It’s a first-person mystery/drama/adventure set in the Wyoming wilderness. You’re Henry. You just got a job in a Firewatch tower. You make contact with another watcher who only exists on the other end of a handheld radio. And then… things happen.)

Being developed by a talented bunch of smarties at Campo Santo, we’re immensely excited to be publishing what’s shaping up to be something special.

We’ve already announced that Firewatch will be coming first to the Mac and PC. (And at WWDC we announced that the Mac version will support Metal for ultimate performance and fidelity! We’re really excited about this.)

But we just announced the other half of the equation…

Firewatch will also be coming to your PlayStation 4.

And there’s more:

Here’s the brand new trailer we just unveiled at Sony’s E3 Keynote:

And here are some fresh in-game screenshots of Firewatch:

We haven’t announced a release date yet — or the release date for the PlayStation 4 version — but keep an eye on our Twitter and we’ll let you know the moment we know.

From the desk of CabelPortland, Oregon 97205

March 9th, 2015

Technically, we’re not actually making the game — we provided the funds to launch both a brand new game studio, Campo Santo, and an ambitious upcoming game… Firewatch.

Panic is, I guess, the “publisher”, although to me that conjures up imagery of a guy in a suit slamming a table and yelling “If you don’t add a goddamn assault rifle in the first five minutes of this snooze-fest we’re shutting this whole thing down!”. We are not that publisher. Campo Santo has become extended Panic family, and we feel as strongly about Firewatch as we do any of our apps.

“In Firewatch, you play as a man named Henry who has retreated from his messy life to work as a fire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness. Perched high atop a mountain, it’s your job to look for smoke and keep the wilderness safe. Your supervisor, a woman named Delilah, is available to you at all times over a small, handheld radio — and is your only contact with the world you’ve left behind.”

We talked a lot about how we wanted to do that. Should we get a booth at PAX? E3? What’ll get the word out best? Trade show booths are notoriously expensive — I’ll never forget getting yelled at once because I was carrying in a single box to our Macworld Booth one year, that was the Union’s job!, not to mention the $1,500 three-day internet — plus your game gets lost in a giant sea of bright lights and loud garbage.

So, we focused on GDC — the Game Developer’s Conference — a time when a lot of press and peers are in one place. Then, we thought it’d be more cost effective and possibly more powerful to do something “off-campus” — make a destination for attendees. And since not everyone can afford to attend GDC, we thought it’d be incredible to do a Public Demo Day, where anyone in town could play an early build of Firewatch for themselves, for free.

Sounds great. But how could we make this event feel amazing for our guests?

We needed to find the right space… and lights… and trees.

Because we brought Firewatch to life.

Guests were greeted with some helpful signage. To the right, we built a full recreation of Henry’s tower and desk… down to the smallest Olly Moss-crafted detail.

On the left, we set up these demo stations with the latest build of the game right in the middle of our own tiny forest.

(That’s Rich Sommer, the voice of Henry in our game — you know him as Harry Crane from Mad Men. I asked if it was weird playing a game with his own voice but he said that kind of out-of-body experience doesn’t really affect him anymore.)

We even included some cool special effects, like this magic poster at the entry stairs:

(FYI, the secret to an eye-fooling projection is to project onto a textured surface — in our case, canvas — and layer a lighting effect on top that spills outside the primary surface — in this case, faux window light.)

The doors opened and we were slammed. Nearly a thousand people showed up to our (quickly-very-toasty) venue and played the game. We got a giant stack of feedback forms and learned a lot about what was, and what wasn’t, working. The experience was invaluable for us.

Plus, the reactions to the demo have blown us away:

Rock Paper Shotgun: “It was agonising when the demo ended – I desperately wanted to play more. I wanted to know what happens next! Despite the fact that, looking back, what had happened so far was so relatively mundane. It was the strength of the characters, and the wonderful sense of place, that made me not want to have to leave.”

gameinformer: “Firewatch is my favorite game from GDC. It immediately hooked me, and I never knew what I would find next. […] I’m still thinking a lot about my time with Firewatch, and that says something.”

Spectre Collie: “If we get enough people pointing at a beautiful, engaging, and mature experience and saying, ‘This. We want to make more of this,’ then the entire medium will be better off.”

Firewatch has been teed up.

The goal is in our sights.

Now we just have to hit a home run.

I’m not good with sports analogies.

We hope to release Firewatch in late 2015 for Mac, PC, and an as-yet-undisclosed console.

(Production notes! The bulk of the planning, design, and hard work for this event was done by Greg here at Panic, who really did an incredible job. Beautiful photos courtesy Sebastiaan De With. The venue was The Box SF, which was already laden with warm wood and tower-ready windows. Lighting and sound was installed by Got Light. Props came from the incredible Prop House. Our ambient forest sound loops were crafted by Jared Emerson-Johnson. Boombox audio from the incredible Cheap Talk as discovered by Chris Remo. PCs were provided by Nvidia. Our stump tables and chairs came from Campo’s downstairs neighbor, a woodworker, and they were heavy as all hell as it turns out trees are heavy. When we unloaded the stumps to the Campo office, a random San-Fran-coolguy quickly roosted on one and we love him. Secret party weapon: ambient pine scent provided by a hidden Accuscent HD, which delighted me to no end. And everyone at Campo, of course, worked incredibly hard to guide players, talk to press, make everyone feel welcome! Thanks!)

From the desk of Cabel Engineering Dept.

February 17th, 2015

EditorConfig is a clever idea: a simple text file you can put anywhere in your code source that automatically changes settings in your favorite text editor.

For example, let’s say someone decided one project had to use space indentation (for Python?) even though everybody usually uses tabs. With EditorConfig, you can easily declare this setting in an .editorconfig file in the root of the project…

# top-most EditorConfig file

root= true

# 4 space indentation

[*]

indent_style= space

indent_size= 4

…or you could put this file in any folder in your project, and the editor will automatically pick it up. Then, you can easily check this file in to your source control system. Anyone who checks out your project — and uses a EditorConfig-capable editor — will automatically inherit the recommended editor settings.

We thought this was pretty cool, and so did our users, so we went ahead and built an EditorConfig plug-in for Coda 2.5. It currently supports everything except for the text encoding setting.